Sunday, January 9, 2011

DRIVING FORCE (1989)

Alright, everyone can relax. They still serve Pabst Blue Ribbon in the post-apocalypse. There, I just saved you 90 minutes of your life that would have been otherwise wasted on this piece of shit. Happy fuckin’ birthday.This is one of the best examples of Academy’s dubious marketing methods. Each element of advertising is like a siren, luring you toward a rocky fate with promises of Sam Jones in Rob Halford gear and clown car demolition derbies. All of these things are lies. The closest Jones gets to leather in this movie is Catherine Bach’s face. Holy crap, does she look bad in this. For those of you struggling with the name, she’s best known for playing Daisy Duke in the original “Dukes of Hazzard” series. She was pretty hot on that show, and it’s not like this was too far along after that, so she must have been on one hell of a bender up to this point. She looks like Leatherface in an Ari Up wig here.

Right out of the gate, this flick commits a cardinal sin which is unforgivable within this particular subgenre, where they don’t really bother to explain just what brought the world to its grim state. Okay, I understand that this is a Filipino production, but they couldn't have strung a loose introduction together with public domain footage that explains the global situation a little better? The most they give us is that unemployment is, like, really high. So the job market is shitty. That’s it.

The initial story is shades of "Dead End Drive-In," where tow truck driver Steve (Jones) finds himself at odds with a pack of feudal wreckers, lead by Nelson (Don Swayze). What really foils the proceedings though are two whack soap opera style plots, revolving around a custody battle between Steve and the parents of a woman with whom he’s had a child. Then there’s a burgeoning romance between he and some chick named Harry (it’s the future, I guess) played by Bach. Swayze's character is even diagnosed with cancer, but it doesn't really have much of an effect on him. He's an asshole in the beginning, and he's still an asshole later on, so I don't know why they went there. In all, it’s pretty much like a super shitty episode of"Dallas" set in Detroit.

This movie manages to avoid being obvious, but that’s actually a bad thing in this case, because anywhere you can go with this story in your own head will pretty much be better than where the story actually ends up. The custody battle just fills time they couldn't afford to stock with shit blowing up. It also goes nowhere. Meanwhile, the bad guys spend an inordinate amount of time repeatedly harassing and threatening Steve. Then Steve contributes to the cycle of boringness by retaliating. After which, the heavies sit around, pissing and moaning about how they "should have killed him the last time." Well then why didn't you? What, did the 37 opportunities prior to this point where he was at your mercy just not "feel" right, asshole? Give me a break!

In the end, what you get is a lame duck drama that fails to commit to themes of revenge because the writer didn’t have the balls to throw in some rape or murder. The tacked on post-apocalypse theme is contemptibly shallow, if not entirely inconsequential. There's nothing worse than a bunch of assholes who decide to make a movie of this nature simply because they think it’s a cheat on putting effort and money into good locations or production design. Billy Blanks is more of a badass because I now know that he managed to have some facsimile of a career after dragging it from the twisted, burning wreckage that is “Driving Force.”